Are you using this or any desktop search on the default Eee installation?

Great, thanks! I'm indexing right now.

I'll start a walkthrough for beginner users here, although I have to verify some of this stuff. This is for Easy Mode. It's generally the same as installation in any Debian derivative environment, but the part in bold is unique to the Eee.

Open a terminal -- ctrl-alt-t
Type: sudo pico /etc/apt/sources.list

Add this line at the bottom:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free

Hit ctrl-x then y then enter to save.

Now type:

sudo apt-get update

You can ignore the certificate issue, as far as I can tell... the certificate does not seem to do anything except prevent you from getting a warning in the next step.

sudo apt-get install google-desktop-linux

Say yes when asked if you want to install from an unverified source. Unless you don't trust Google. :p

Reboot.

Open a terminal and type:

gdlinux &

You should now have a colored-swirl icon in the tray. It will also start indexing. You can right click and do index -> index status to see progress and change preferences. You should let it index, which may take one or more hours depending on how many files you have. This is a one-time only deal.

It looks like, to get it working in simple mode, you have to edit /usr/bin/startsimple.sh and add a line.

sudo pico /usr/bin/startsimple.sh

Add

gdlinux &

underneath the lines that say:

        icewmtray &
        powermonitor &
        minimixer &
        networkmonitor ath0 eth0 &
        wapmonitor &
-->  gdlinux &

Again, ctrl-x, y, enter, to save. Now on reboot, the tool will be available automatically.

Also, be forewarned that, as startsimple.sh is located in system territory, it is quite possible that this file may get overwritten during a future Asus update. If that were to happen, you would probably have to make changes to it again. Unlike the IceWM mods that can be placed in the home directory, I don't know of any way to get around this. Thanks to the excellent Berkus for instructions on how to customize tray icons.

You can now press ctrl twice, or double click the tray icon, to pull up the tool.

Last edited by mkrishnan (2007-11-20 12:27:47 pm)

I did note that a lot of the default preferences are kind of goofy. It searches a whole bunch of system locations like /usr/share... in OS X, I actually do use spotlight to get at system files occasionally (like we have people spotlight plist preference files that sometimes get corrupted, as its the easiest way to find and delete them), but I chose to delete all these on my Eee, leaving just /usr/home. I'm not sure whether it'll automatically spotlight USB or SD (which mount inside the home directory)... I'll have to explore that.

Also, some other strange default preferences include searching the web by default instead of the desktop, which seems idiotic to me. I also turned off the integration that makes desktop results come up in web searches, although I might turn that back on.

Finally, it doesn't seem to be indexing anything in Thunderbird at the moment. The only mail account I have set up in there right now is GMail, which it's indexing through the GMail option, but it doesn't seem to see events in my Sunbird/Lightning calendar or contacts in Thunderbird proper. Hopefully those are limitations that can be addressed at some point, although I do have Thunderbird set up to require a password when run; I don't know if this impacts anything.

I don't know if this is an Eee Easy Mode issue, but it seemed somewhat limited in what it would accept as a hotkey for the quick search tool. Ctrl-Alt combinations seemed to be a no-go. Ctrl-Ctrl seems okay enough, though, so I'll live with that for now.

Other than that, it's definitely a nice addition. It's no Spotlight, but it is usable.

Last edited by mkrishnan (2007-11-20 11:11:50 am)

I'm unsure if it's indexing my MMC SDHC card... I have set it to do so within the preferences (and removed some of the bizarre areas of the hard-drive it was set to to search...)

Have you got a flash card? Can GDesktop index it?

(Index footprint will grow as the number of files it indexes grows! My desktop PC has a huge index footprint (I use Copernican).)

Last edited by Wedge (2007-11-20 1:02:17 pm)

The easiest estimate of the index file seems to be looking at the size of the .google folder (i.e.  du -h --max-depth 0 ~/.google).... mine came out to be about 115 MB, which is kind of odd considering that I had only about 350MB of files to begin with in indexed areas.

I actually finally decided that it seemed to be having too much of a negative performance impact, so I removed it. Nicely, when you use apt-get to remove it, it's actually good enough to delete your cache in the process.

I had to manually add the card's directory to get it to index it. Mine was >100MB *after* forcing indexing of only the home directory and my SD card.... But then I was indexing GMail, and I have rather a lot of messages in GMail.

I think that's wise, yeah. That should substantially cut down on your index size. FWIW, I believe I added in the SD card as

/home/user/MMC-SD/sd/

(sd was the name of the formatted volume on it.) And it worked fine. FWIW, GDL does not appear to follow symbolic links -- the directory on my SD for instance that had all the Articles in it was already symlinked as /home/user/PDF and as /home/user/My Documents/Articles, but it didn't catch the files via either link. I ended up just having it index two sites -- /home/user/My Documents/ and /home/user/MMC-SD/sd/.

In any event, the way I use my Eee, I can probably actually live without desktop search for the time being, while I wait around the longer issue of native driver support in Ubuntu that would let me ditch the Asus distribution altogether.

Google Desktop is integrated into 'the Google search page' - y'know, google.com

So it doesn't take up any space on the desktop. There is the Google Desktop icon on the taskbar, to the right, and if you double click it, you can have a 'search box' appear, but in general, you go to google.com and there is a Desktop search option,

Here's two images: http://desktop.google.com/en/linux/features.html

And here's several more: http://desktop.google.com/en/linux/gettingstarted.html

is this not working for any body else?

My console reads, couldn't find package

Never mind, I made a mistake adding the google repository.

No, it doesn't; this is version 1 for Linux, I think they are on version 4 for Windows.

Hmm...that's odd. I'm pretty sure it was doing that successfully for me (I've since moved on, though, and I use Tracker, the default on Ubuntu now).